Configuring software applications can be a difficult task. The difficulty in configuring such systems grows in complexity as the size of the software application increases. An example of a complex software application to configure is an enterprise resource planning (“ERP”) application. Efforts to configure such applications often involve a large number of employees and consultants. Modifying a large software application configuration or upgrading such an application can involve equal amounts of time and cost as an initial implementation.
A major cause for the complexity of modifying and upgrading such software applications is that configuration settings are often stored in configuration tables. The configurations settings in these tables do not provide context of what the configuration setting is for, other than by reference to a manual or from the experience of person modifying the setting.
Prior efforts have provided solutions that separate an application configuration environment from an application execution environment. In some instances, such as in U.S. Published patent application Ser. No. 11/512,440 entitled DEPLOYMENT (filed Aug. 29, 2006), a deployment process may execute to deploy configuration settings from the application configuration environment to the application execution environment. As the deployment is performed, a log of deployment activity is created along with an indicator of the status of the deployment activities, such as success or failure. Following deployment, to view the logs, an administrator wishing to view the result of a deployment opens the log for the individual application instance that was deployed. The results of the deployment provide a great amount of detail, but do not provide a summary of what deployment activities were successful and which were not. Further, an administrator may be responsible for multiple deployed application instances across a number of application execution environments. To view the results of multiple deployments, the administrator is required to log into each application instance in each application execution environment to search through the deployment logs to determine the deployment status of each application instance. Further, if an application configuration has been modified in an application configuration environment, the administrator will not be aware of the differences unless the administrator has been notified by the person or process making the configuration changes.